It’s the Vision Forum at the Beeb this week: lots of tasty sessions with super-famous creatives and actors, discussing their work and generally adding to an atmosphere of grooviness. I went to three sessions today, on Being Human, The Cut and Psychoville. Among the things I learned:

Being Human was originally conceived as a drama about university graduates living together. One was an agoraphobic, one was compulsively anti-social with rage issues, and one was a recovering sex addict. The monsters were added later: ghost trapped in house, werewolf, and guilty vampire. Neat, no?

The Cut is written in five minute chunks to create a 25-minute TV broadcast once a week. It’s really good. What I learned from this one is how creative production crews are being when it comes to shooting stuff on low budgets. The Cut is all filmed within five minutes of the offices of BBC Switch, the assistant director is also a writer, and the script supervisor also works on the Switch website. Also, the teenage stars looked embarrassed and blushingly young all the way through the presentation, until the moment the microphone was passed to them and they switched, immediately, until professional mode. It was amazing and rather charming.

When Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith started Psychoville, they had no idea when it would end. Also, while they were pushing to get it commissioned, they arranged an open readthrough/performance at Notting Hill which attracted an audience in three figures and which showed that the material was funny (the audience laughed) as well as horrific. And Psychoville is what they call Royston Vasey in Japan. Fact.

I would like to explain the gratuitous picture of Lenora Crichlow, who is beautiful in Being Human but mesmerising in the flesh. Not really a lesson, but interesting nonetheless.

Mark Thompson gave a punchy and coherent response to both James Murdoch and Ben Bradshaw today. Here was my favourite bit:

Wherever it can be – and certainly in the case of the BBC – public space is free at the point of use. And the more people who use it the better.

Consider the contrast between the availability of music and arts on Sky Arts and on BBC Television. Sky Arts is one of the most positive developments in multi-channel television. It has some brilliant programming. It extends the choice and range of music and arts available on TV. In a typical seven days, it reaches perhaps half a million people.

But arts on the BBC is simply of a different order. To quote just one statistic, this summer more than twelve million people in this country sampled the Proms on BBC Television before the Last Night. IÃ¢â‚¬â„¢m not claiming any special credit for that, by the way – the BBC exists in part to make the arts universally available, Sky does not. Private space focuses on the minority who already have a taste for the arts, public space reaches out across the population.

In the case of the BBC, thereÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s another important characteristic. ThereÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s no demand curve and no exclusion. You canÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t buy a better service from the BBC no matter how wealthy you are. And you canÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t stop people who are less well off than you enjoying just as good a service as you do.

Public space is shared space.

ThatÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s why we will never erect a pay zone around our news.

ThatÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s why we will fight tooth and nail to preserve our broad public remit Ã¢â‚¬â€œ from Strictly to the Poetry Season.

And public space is independent space.

I got that from Mark Thompson speech | Tom Watson MP. And Tom applauds Thompson for coming out fighting. Having spent the last two days with young people who passionately believe in the BBC and passionately disagree with James Murdoch, I’m coming round to the idea that a good fight is maybe what we all need.

One of the projects that’s most excited me at the BBC is Lab-UK. Essentially, it’s a platform for doing mass-audience experiments which are scientifically valid (there’s other cool stuff going on under the hood, but that’s what we’re doing with it right now). Our latest mass-participation experiment is Brain Test Britain, which seeks to find out if “brain training” actually works, by getting people to play brain training games online and tracking their progress over time.

This is hugely ambitious, not least because we’re trying to get thousands of users to stay with a longitudinal experiment. But the designers of the experiment (Professor Clive Ballard of the AlzheimerÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s Society and Kings College, London, and Dr Adrian Owen of the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge) hope that by getting thousands of people to complete the experiments, we can get proper scientific papers and proper scientific understanding.

There are more Lab-UK experiments in the pipeline. Suffice to say that what with this and our Earth suite of products (Earth News, the just-redesigned Out of the Wild and Nature’s Library) there’s some fantastically cool stuff going on here. And none of it could happen anywhere else.

I haven’t written about the new job yet, as it’s still early days and there’s a lot to take in, unsurprisingly. But it’s an absolute pleasure to celebrate one amazing piece of work: the project to open up the BBCÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s natural history archive. The project’s been led by Tom Scott and it’s his blog post I’m linking to here.

Read Tom’s post to get the full glorious detail, but suffice to say this is the kind of work which made me want to join the BBC in the first place. Congratulations to all involved.

Links from the BBC have, historically, been some of the most important links that a website can get and there can be no doubt that Google rates the BBC as one of the most trusted sites on the web.

The links used to be direct links but they are now passing through two redirect scripts using a 302 redirect which is highly unlikely to pass any PageRank.

Don’t know if I’d use “greedy” as an adjective. “Unthinking,” probably. I imagine what’s happened is that this has been done without any thought to sites being linked to, and this was no doubt the easiest way of counting clicks out of the site (Yahoo! does the same, or at least used to, from a lot of its pages).

What it does signify is the BBC’s singular lack of awareness of what its digital footprint is, in terms of its interconnectedness with the “non-BBC web” (and I bet a lot of people over there think of it as the “non-BBC web”, too). Somebody at the Big British Castle should have thought “hang on, we can give Google juice to other sites, and we can celebrate it too, and that would be good for the BBC and good for British web publishing.” The fact that no-one had that thought, apparently, is what we should be dissing the Castle for, not what looks like rather a clumsy technical implementation.

I was going to have a mild-mannered fortnight-late rant about the BBC’s new inline links experiment, in response to Metcalfe here and the BBC Editors blog here, but I find that SteveJack Pickard’s already done a good job (sorry, Jack, thanks for the name correction!). To summarise his articulate meltdown: why add Javascript-dependent links which pop up little boxes in the page when there’s already a perfectly workable linking metaphor called, umm, the Web.

The Editors and Metcalfe humm and haw around this, arguing that this kind of inline link doesn’t interrupt your reading experience (err, of course it does, the only thing that wouldn’t is no link at all), that snippets are appropriate to the context (so when do they become inappropriate?) and that Javascript should just be taken as read these days (which is sort of OK, unless there are good reasons for you not having Javascript turned on).

But pull back a second. Look at the history of the BBC’s linking to external sites. Pretty reluctant, no? Not exactly in the mainstream of link thinking, wouldn’t you say? They’re even messing about with linking to sister companies and not to the rest of the Web. In this, the BBC acts like a particularly ill-informed media company, hugely resistant to “sending users elsewhere” and determined to keep their claws in the user’s flesh for as long as possible. You still see this a lot – with consulting clients, I still have to argue long and hard that “sending the user to a new window” when they click a link is dumb, doesn’t do what it sets out to achieve and has a profound pointlessness.

And yet the BBC still acts with enormous reluctance when it comes to linking externally. It dresses this up in legal concerns, in usability concerns, in editorial concerns – none of which worry even the most paranoid blogger. Let’s be clear: the BBC is judging itself in the harshest commercial terms. It wants to keep users on its site for as long as possible. It believes that every link to the external web is an exit route out of bbc.co.uk. It sees the web – the whole Web – as a nest of competitors determined to snaffle up its precious userbase. It is, in this regard, the anti-Google. And until it finds a new psychology, half-baked fannying around with bizarre linking metaphors will continue.